Nuusita Ashipala
Ondangwa
Northern Electricity Distributor (Nored) has increased its turnover by 10 percent from N$764 million in the previously financial year to N$864 million this year. Nored board chairperson Sacky Kayone said the increase was due to increased tariffs and new customer connections made by June.
In addition to the increased turnover, Nored also saw an increase of 13 percent on its cost of sales, while its gross profit increased by two percent from N$210 million to N$214 million.
About N$6 million, which was wrongly charged on penalties by NamPower, was reimbursed back to Nored. This was announced at the 15th annual general meeting of Nored attended by stakeholders at Ondangwa on Friday.
Apart from the price increases, stakeholders at the meeting complained about the delay in electricity connections and power outages at Okahao, Eenhana as well as Nkurenkurul. Okahao Town Council in particular complained that they were losing investors as a result.
In response Nored CEO Fillemon Nakashole said they were aware of the shortcomings, which he said were influenced by, amongst others, the tedious process of applying for power to preparing the quotations.
“We have the capacity. We have appointed 23 external contractors to aid in clearing the backlog and by June 2017 we only had a month’s backlog,” Nakashole said, adding that government projects continue to enjoy priority when it comes to electrification.
He thus appealed to regional councils to alert Nored when making applications for electrification for government projects, so that these can be exempted from the long queue of electrification applications.
While several achievements were recorded over the past year, Nored continues to face challenges. Kayone said the issue of transmission capacity constraints to the northeast regions would only be addressed once the transmission project is completed by NamPower. The projection timeframe for completion is sometime within the 2018/19 financial year. Similarly, the rains continue to affect service delivery in many areas. In addition, there has also been an increase in incidents of vandalism of the network infrastructure by the public. Apart from building under power lines, some customers are denying others access to electricity by forbidding them to dig through their mahangu fields, it was noted.
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Caption (Nored jpg)